The fight against an international trade treaty wrecking our NHS receives a boost from the nurses and activists, though most party leaderships are strangely quiet.
RCN flag at Congress. RCN.
It’s customary to refer to NHS privatization with a
time-scale appendage e.g. ‘slow motion privatisation’ ‘creeping privatisation’
‘step wise privatisation’. This makes the process sound ominous but not
entirely inevitable. That if we
play our cards right there remain moments of opportunity en-route, to slow down
or reverse the process. .
TTIP (Transatlantic Trade & Investment
Partnership) would be NHS privatisation on speed. It would close the door on itself once allowed in. It’s
about much more than trade. There are not really major trade barriers between
the US and EU, tariffs that could be reduced maybe.
TTIP is a corporate wish list for access to untapped
markets. For the weakening of
standards, regulations and access rights, many of which have been fought for
over many decades: workers rights, food standards, financial regulations,
healthcare services and so on. In short anything that is prohibitive to profit
could face the chop.
TTIP envisions the establishment of a
'Regulatory Cooperation Council'. Big Business has been lobbying for this for
years. It basically means that corporations can 'nip in the bud' government
policy, stuff that would potentially be a corporate inconvenience would never
progress past the proposal stage.
If regulation did sneak through then there is the
'investor-state dispute settlement' (ISDS) which allows big corporations to sue
governments if they don’t get what they want.
Existing bilateral
treaties show the dangers ahead. Multinational health investor Eureko sued
the Polish government under the Netherlands-Poland investment protection
treaty for €1.8billion. The elected government’s crime? To stand in the way of
Euroko’s profit making potential by refusing to float shares of the formerly
government owned health insurance company, PZU, on the stock exchange. The
company’s actions also extracted a commitment for further privatization of
PZU.
TTIP could dramatically extend this kind of
corporate power grab to the heart of our world-renowned NHS.
So where does Cameron stand on the NHS and TTIP?
It makes for painful reading. He told the Mail in April:
"So many of us have been there. You're
in the waiting room as your child goes into the operating theatre. The minutes
feel like hours, and the hours go on forever. As you wait for news, a
nurse comes to put your mind at rest, reassuring you that your child is in the
best possible hands. And in that moment you feel overwhelming gratitude towards
our National Health Service."
The thrust of the coalition governments ‘Health
and Social Care Act’ (to quote from the corporate dictionary’) is to
‘harmonise’ the UK with the US health system, and open it up to corporations to compete for NHS contracts.
TTIP adds the muscle to the bones. There is a risk that if ISDS were applied to
the NHS, that repealing key
aspects of the Health and Social Care Act would be deemed to be in
breach of the free-trade agreement. It would be set in stone.
Current talk of a move toward “harmony” between
the US health system and the NHS doesn’t come at a particularly good time for
the free marketers. The NHS has just been declared the world's best healthcare
system by the Washington-based Commonwealth Fund,
and the US the worst.
But right wing think tank ‘Reform’ have released a
report regarding the benefits of moving the UK health system in the direction
of the US system. Incidentally David Cameron’s chief health advisor Nick Seddon, a
private healthcare advocate, was a chief lobbyist for Reform before walking the
corridors at no 10. In itself a cause for enormous concern.
Despite his sweet sweet words regarding the NHS,
David Cameron has said of TTIP:
“It is a once in a lifetime prize”
When asked in the house of commons if the NHS
would be excluded from TTIP he said:
“I am not aware of a specific exemption
for any particular area, but I think that the health service would be treated
in the same way in relation to EU-US negotiations as it is in relation to EU
rules”
Clearly not pursuing NHS exclusion.
Furthermore, with Cameron in NHS spin salesman
mode:
“We should not be frightened of our NHS being a
great British success story, parts of which can be exported to the rest of the
world”
Coalition partner Nick
Clegg has openly supported TTIP in the European Union TV debates earlier in the year and has dismissed fears
of its impact on the NHS. Shadow Secretary of State
for Health Andy Burnham has been clear in his stance that the NHS should be protected from the
treaty, but the Labour leadership have not opposed TTIP. UKIP has
studiously avoided
commenting on TTIP. The Green Party are opposed to TTIP in its entirety,
Caroline Lucas tabled an early day motion to
that effect in November of last year.
The good news is that the fight against TTIP is
taking off.
The Royal College of Nurses are leading the way
with the fight back to protect the NHS: Gay Lee, of the Inner South East
London branch proposed the
following resolution to congress:
“That this meeting of RCN Congress urges Council
to lobby against the inclusion of health services in the Transatlantic Trade
and Investment Partnership (TTIP)”
Gay said: “If health is not excluded, then it
could be traded in the same way as baked beans or energy - The NHS is not about
making money but about putting patients first. That’s what we all love about
it.”
John Hill of the Scunthorpe branch said: “I
would suggest that a couple of months ago the vast majority of you would never
have heard of TTIP. But this is one of the biggest threats to the NHS that
there has been”
Calling for increased openness in the way TTIP
is being negotiated, RCN Deputy President Cecilia Anim said: “This needs to be
done in an open and transparent way with full public engagement. There have to
be red lines that can’t be crossed - and the NHS is one of those red lines.
TTIP will have wider irreversible implications for all of us in our
working lives. We’re being kept in the dark and we have to stop it”
The resolution unsurprisingly was passed with
overwhelming support. 97.16% (461) For
Against: 2.84% (13) and 14 abstained.
Its not quite 100%. There will always be
‘outliers’, like the London nurse Andy Mcgovern who made the papers last week
having proposed a £10 fee for GP visits (a suggestion that was overwhelmingly defeated). There will
always be these moments where founding principles of the NHS need to be
defended, in this case free access at the point of use.
On July 12th, activists, unions, environmentalists, health campaigners, food
campaigners and others will come together in a national day of action against
TTIP.
There are no signs that public support is dipping for the NHS, despite the constant media heckling. The Commonwealth Fund that places the NHS as the best healthcare provider in the world is a great and much needed tonic, for both service users and workers. It is also a much needed lift as the fight against TTIP gets underway.